Data Visualization × Speculative Design on Visualizing.JP

Pattern from Afar, Data up Close: 3,400 Years on the Walls of The Room of Change

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0900

The Room of Change is a room that sets a hand-made wallpaper running from 1000 BCE to 2400 CE beside the “twenty years seen from above” of NASA’s satellite imagery. Lupi calls NASA’s twenty years a “large scale,” and writes that the wall complements it with a story of smaller, more everyday, more relatable and mundane change. The NYT called the part running to 2400 a speculative future, and Lupi wrote that change will likely continue. This wall, pattern from afar and data up close, can be read as turning distant change into a long present that can be read at the scale of the body, and as placing the future not as a firm forecast but as a conditional “if things continue as they are.”

The maker is Accurat, the design firm co-founded by Giorgia Lupi. It was commissioned for the first room of the main exhibition of the 22nd Triennale Milano in 2019, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival (curator: Paola Antonelli). Following the official descriptions by Lupi and Accurat, the exhibition’s official pages, and the press coverage of the time, this article reads the work in the order a visitor meets it after entering the room.

In the entrance room, twenty years seen from above

Broken Nature is an exhibition built around restorative design. It examines the threads connecting humans and the natural environment that have frayed or snapped. On the official checklist, this work is one of four special commissions. In the exhibition’s own words, its role was to welcome visitors into the galleries and set the tone for the whole show.

On entering, one first sees two large screens straight ahead. They show NASA footage of the Earth over the past twenty years, taken from above. The NYT identifies it as NASA’s Images of Change. Before/after pairs of the same place are lined up, such as the urban expansion of Shanghai (1984-2018).

Two suspended screens show satellite imagery; behind them a horizontally striped tapestry continues along the wall, and a white pedestal stands on the floor

Lupi’s explanation starts from one premise: most change can only be shown “from far away and from up high.”

So Lupi calls NASA’s twenty years the “large scale.” With the tapestry on the wall, she writes, the room complements it with stories of smaller, more everyday, more relatable change. At the center of the room stands a pedestal carrying a legend for the entire wall. Lupi likened it to a map for looking at a mountain range.

From a distance, it looks like wallpaper

Beside and behind the screens, a mural of about 30 meters wraps around three walls. It is described as a hand-made data tapestry, or data-driven wallpaper. The NYT wrote of a “100-foot wallpaper mural.”

An exhibition room where a tapestry of pale horizontal stripes and symbols wraps around three walls, with a legend pedestal at the center

What catches the eye first is not a chart. Lupi herself writes: at first glance one may not notice that data organizes the motifs; muted shapes, lines and patterns covering the history of the Anthropocene may not register on entering. Accurat’s earlier case study repeats the same observation.

Accurat writes that a gentle complexity invites exploration. From this wording, the fact that it is hard to notice as data can be seen as part of a design meant to invite exploration. It can be said that it is wallpaper first and data second.

There is a reason for the handwork as well. Accurat explains that the materiality of handwork strengthens the lasting effects of human action and turns raw data into an emotional experience. Lupi describes her method as deliberately humanistic. Her position is that data is a snapshot of real life, and that numbers are always a stand-in for something else.

Up close, horizontal is time and vertical is simultaneity

Move closer to the wall and the rules of the pattern become readable. The official way to read it is in two directions: left to right like a book, and at the same time vertically.

The horizontal direction is time. Left is the past, center is the present, right is the future. In a schematic from the production materials, the left wall is assigned 1000-1900 BCE, the front wall 1900-2000, and the right wall 2000-2400. The 100 years of the twentieth century take up a whole wall, and the 400 years beyond take one wall as well. From the diagram, it can be read that the width of the walls does not divide time evenly either.

A floor plan of the three walls: the left wall covers 1000-1900 BCE, the front wall 1900-2000, the right wall 2000-2400

Accurat / Giorgia Lupi

Each horizontal stripe is a story of its own. There are eight macro themes: Nature, Universe, Animal Kingdom, Society, Hope, Happiness, Science and Technology. Each theme contains one story tied to a specific region and two global subjects. Shape represents the theme, color the geographic or cultural place, and horizontal position the time.

Macro theme	Region-specific story	Global subjects
Nature	The disappearance of the Aral Sea	Human environmental impact, climate change
Universe	Prophecies of the future (told in the past)	Records of lunar and solar eclipses, space exploration
Hope	Cambodia’s civil war and life expectancy	Death by continent, life by continent
Technology	South Korea’s technological revolution	Fossil fuel consumption, access to technology

(Four of the eight themes, excerpted. The full set is in the central legend.)

The public legend: a plan of the three walls, the color codes, and how to read the eight themes

Accurat / Giorgia Lupi

Global lines such as world population and average temperature frame the piece with a “broad brushstroke.” Within that frame sit thin lines such as the Aral Sea and Cambodia. Lupi writes that layering colder, more sterile data with smaller, more relatable information makes for a more meaningful result. With global indicators alone it is unclear whose story the numbers tell, and a single local line can be read as bringing them back to a place.

Looking vertically gives a cross-section of a given year. Accurat writes that read horizontally it is eight chapters of human interaction, and seen vertically it is the entanglement of forces in a particular year. Population, temperature, disease, exports and happiness line up at the same position on the same wall. It can be read as a proposal: to repair one relationship, look at its interactions with everything it touches.

A close-up of the tapestry: thin vertical lines serve as time ticks, with colored bands and strips overlapping

From the Giorgia Lupi official page (data-detail)

At this point the meaning of the central pedestal becomes clear. In the Nightingale interview, Lupi puts her reason for calling herself an information designer rather than an artist in the legend. It is about handing over access to the data, not only an experience. This is not a diagram a pilot uses to decide on a landing, so it is fair to ask for time to read it.

What is the 2400 at the right edge saying?

The right edge of the wall is 2400. The NYT called this part a speculative future. Its first publication misprinted the year as 2040, later corrected to 2400.

Lupi’s wording is careful. She writes about how change has occurred over past centuries, is occurring now, and will “likely” (likely) continue. The work does not call itself speculative. Even so, from the word likely and the wall running to 2400, the right edge can be read not as a firm forecast but as an extension of the current trajectory, that is, a conditional of the form “if things continue as they are.”

The exhibition as a whole also asks for this long reach. Antonelli told the NYT that it is an exhibition for citizens. She hopes visitors will take away a sense of the long term, a sense that complexity is a friend and not an enemy, and a sense of what they can do in daily life. The NYT also quotes the conclusion of Antonelli’s catalog: our only chance of survival is to design our own beautiful extinction.

The 400 years of the right wall can be read as showing that long term as the length of a wall. That the Universe chapter holds prophecies of the future told in the past as data also overlaps here. It can be read that the history of speculation itself lines up on the same wall as the speculative future.

Accurat writes that the room prepares visitors to see the works that follow as “possible solutions.” The same exhibition also includes works of speculative design such as Dunne & Raby’s Foragers. The entrance wall can be seen as a long present for receiving those “what ifs.”

How did third parties see this room?

Press coverage at the time looked less at the accuracy of the data than at whether the room worked as an entrance device. Here are three pieces with different points of focus.

Outlet	What it looks at
The New York Times (2019-03-20)	The shock at the entrance, and long time
Il Post (2019-02-28)	Complexity and artistry together
Nightingale (2019-08-14)	The legend, and the form of weaving

The NYT wrote that the show is intellectual but hits hard, and that human impact is hammered home in the first gallery. In front of the NASA before/afters is a wallpaper mural of color bands and symbols, which it summarizes as the flow of population, disease rates, energy consumption and average temperature. It stated explicitly that the data runs from 1000 BCE to the speculative future of 2400.

Italy’s Il Post wrote that the exhibition’s ambition is clear from the first work. It is an infographic more complex than anything seen before, but surely one of the most artistic, it said. This can be read as a review that took complexity not as a flaw but as the character of the work.

Nightingale is the publication of the Data Visualization Society. The interviewer, Jason Forrest, asked about the resemblance to Anni Albers, then on show at the Tate. Lupi answered that the decision to make a tapestry came first, though the overlap of warp and weft may have been an unconscious influence. A general newspaper wrote of the shock at the entrance, while a fellow visualization practitioner asked about the legend and the weaving. The evaluations divide that way.

Takeaways

There are three things to take from this room into visualization work.

The first is to design the distant view and the close view separately. From far away it holds together as a pattern, and up close it can be read as data. Rather than trying to convey everything in the first few seconds, build a form that gets people to stay first. If a figure asks for reading time, design a place to spend that time alongside it.

The second is to put two views at different scales in the same place. The satellite’s twenty years show large differences, and the wall’s 3,400 years show stories close to daily life. Layer thin region-specific lines, one by one, over thick global lines. From this work, one can take that this lets the figure itself show whose story the numbers tell.

The third is to depict the future as a condition. In this work, the part running to 2400 and the past end-of-the-world prophecies of the Universe chapter line up on the same wall. Lupi writes in her own text that change will likely continue, and the NYT called this part a speculative future. From these facts, the extension to 2400 can be read as a “if things continue as they are” conjecture, not a prediction. Showing the speculative part as speculation can be considered part of the work of visualization too.

References

Primary sources

Secondary sources

The New York Times, The End Is Nigh. Can Design Save Us? (2019-03-20. Corrected to 2400.)
Il Post, “Broken Nature” e come il design potrebbe salvare il mondo (2019-02-28)
Nightingale, The Data We Do Not See: An Interview with Giorgia Lupi (2019-08-14)

Showing an Unmeasurable Sky as a Speculative Window: Giorgia Lupi's 'Plastic Air'

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0900

Giorgia Lupi calls Plastic Air, her web experience about airborne microplastics, a speculative “window” onto a data-driven approximation. She also writes that the visualization methodology itself was work with speculative information that was still limited. This is a work whose author names its uncertainty herself. This article reads it as a piece designed not to be an exact scientific diagram but to make you feel that something unseen is in the sky.

The work was released on Earth Day 2021 in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture. It was made by Lupi with Pentagram’s Talia Cotton and Phil Cox. It is also one of the Heartbeat of the Earth series of climate experiments run by the UNFCCC and Google. What follows draws on the project pages of Lupi and Pentagram, the introduction on Experiments with Google, and the explanatory text of the experience itself, and reads the work in the order a visitor encounters it.

It Starts with “You Don’t See It, but It’s There”

The experience is published at artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/plasticair. When you open it, “PLASTIC / IN THE AIR” appears in large type, with a single sentence at the center.

You don’t see it, but it’s there.

This sentence can be read as summing up the question the work asks. The switch at the center starts the experience. Press it, and particles drift across a screen made to resemble the sky.

The intro screen. A start switch sits below “PLASTIC / IN THE AIR”

Source: Giorgia Lupi / Pentagram / Google Arts & Culture, Plastic Air

The descriptions of the controls below follow the official design. In the current public version, things sometimes do not work as described. This start switch, for example, sits behind the full-screen particle canvas, so clicks do not reach it. In each section I note such cases briefly.

At the top left of the main part is a switch between see and don’t see. In the official description this is the seen/unseen dichotomy. In the official design, see shows abstracted particles drifting, and don’t see makes everyday objects such as straws and bottle caps float in the sky. In the current public version it is not an instant swap: the everyday objects enter gradually from the bottom of the screen.

The don’t see state. Straws and caps drift through the sky in place of particles

Source: Giorgia Lupi / Pentagram / Google Arts & Culture, Plastic Air

Fuorisalone.it summarizes the experience as first asking whether you want to see the problem at all. The author reads see / don’t see as a switch of perception, and also as a performance of a society that chooses not to look.

The creators speak about the difficulty of the subject as well. In an interview with It’s Nice That, Lupi says that, unlike climate stripes or footage of plastic in the ocean, airborne microplastics have few images of harm that one can point to intuitively. The creators’ response published in Communication Arts likewise says that because the subject is literally out of sight, out of mind, they needed to tell the story of plastic disposition in a visceral way.

Approach a Particle and “Possibly From” Appears

The particles drifting in the sky of the main part are drawn in four shapes. A thin waveform is a fibre (Fibre), a right triangle is a film (Film), an irregular lump is a granule (Granule), and a thick diagonal bar is a fragment (Fragment). The official “About this website” explains the interactions in the order Inspect, Deposit, Don’t see.

The first, Inspect, is a hover, not a click. When you bring the cursor near a particle, only that particle stops, and a magnifying lens and an attribute panel appear. This inspection still works in the current public version. The panel has five fields.

Field	Content
Type	Fibre / Film / Granule / Fragment
Composition	The presumed chemical composition, such as nylon, polyurethane, or polystyrene
Possibly from	The presumed original product, such as a sweater, insulation foam, or a shopping bag
Size	In micrometers (μm)
Distance travelled	Distance travelled (km)

Inspecting a particle by hover. Type, Composition, Possibly from, Size, and Distance travelled are listed

Source: Giorgia Lupi / Pentagram / Google Arts & Culture, Plastic Air

What deserves attention is that the field for origin says possibly from, not “from”. It’s Nice That reports an example in which an orange triangle is polystyrene that may come from cutlery. A thread-like particle is polyester that may come from a sweater. Both are “may”.

The contents of this field are assigned at random from a product list prepared for each type. For fibres: sweaters, fishing nets, nylon toothbrush bristles. For granules: bottles, bumpers, disposable cutlery. For films: shopping bags, shower curtains, straws. For fragments: CDs, flooring, keyboards. The single word “possibly” can be read as a mark showing that the display is an estimate.

In her manifesto “Data Humanism,” Lupi wrote that being data-driven does not mean absolute truth. She also states that visualization should embrace imperfection and approximation. She writes that Plastic Air is a practice of Data Humanism. The author reads the single word in the hover as that principle moved into interaction.

The next, Deposit, is described officially as follows: when you click the sky, the everyday object corresponding to the daily act named by the label beside the cursor (Drink a latte, Do my laundry, and so on) breaks down and becomes particles. In the current public version, the label receives the click, and the breakdown is barely visible.

Rain, City, Future: The Logic of the Sky Changes

On the left of the screen are three sets of buttons that change conditions. Weather is Not Set / Rain / Snow, place is Not Set / Urban / Remote, and time is Now / Future. Hover over a button and a short explanation appears of what that condition does to the particles.

Set	Gist of the explanation
Weather	Rain carries particles in raindrops, so there are more. Snow: in the Arctic they become smaller, travel farther, and fragment
Place	Urban has more fibres because of clothing and everyday goods. Remote: they become smaller, travel farther, and fragment
Time	Future: there is no means of removal, and the equivalent of 12 billion tonnes will accumulate by 2050

When you choose a condition, the numbers in the legend at the lower left change, and the makeup of the particles in the sky follows. These conditions and the legend still work in the current public version. In the initial state, each of the four types of Quantity is 25%. This does not mean the world average is even; it is the default when no condition is selected. Choose Urban and fibres become 90% and fragments 10%, with films and granules at 0%. Combine Remote and Rain and fibres are 66%, with the other three types at 11.3% each.

The legend when Urban is chosen. Fibres 90%, Fragments 10%, Films and Granules 0%

Source: Giorgia Lupi / Pentagram / Google Arts & Culture, Plastic Air

Google’s brief was to visualize the danger of plastic pollution. There were two constraints. The subject is invisible to the naked eye. And research on airborne microplastics was then still in its infancy, with no single definitive dataset. Experiments with Google states that scientists from the University of Strathclyde and Utah State University carried out the scientific review.

As far as the author could trace the proportions on screen, the behavior for each weather and place seems to be built not from one integrated dataset but from the logic of separate site-specific studies. Read that way, the ratios in the sky are not measurements of the whole sky but an approximate model that bundles the logic of site-specific studies. The experience itself also writes that the greatest risk is what we do not know.

The Clear button on the left does not erase the sky either. Press it and an explanation appears: “Did you really think that would work?” It goes on to say that plastic is made to be durable, and once it is there, it does not disappear.

Answering “Yes! Well, sort of.”

In the official design, opening Find out More at the right edge of the screen shows an explanation of how it works and the papers it drew on. In the current public version, this tab often does not open. The legend for how the particles are drawn (Fig. 2) is also inside this panel. The shapes correspond to a classification seen under the microscope, and the colors are a palette of the full rainbow plus black, white, and transparent. Size is drawn as a continuous quantity from 1μm (about the size of a red blood cell) to 1,000μm (1mm).

The official legend showing the shape of each particle type, the color palette, and the range of sizes

Source: Giorgia Lupi / Pentagram / Google Arts & Culture, Plastic Air

Lupi writes that she chose bright, glossy colors like plastic itself. The author reads the colors not as a code for telling types apart but as a reflection of the fact that real particles are found in a variety of colors.

On the accuracy of the visualization, the official answer is as follows.

Yes! Well, sort of.

It goes on to say that the shapes are based on microscope classification, but that the visualization is an abstraction. An answer that neither claims exactness nor calls the work pure invention can be read as showing the work’s position well.

Lupi herself describes the experience this way.

a speculative “window” onto a data-driven approximation

She also writes that the visualization methodology itself was work with speculative information that was still limited. Speculative design sets up conditions and makes a reality or future that is not now visible something that can be discussed. This article reads data visualization and speculative design as meeting in this self-definition. Being speculative can be read not as letting go of science but as taking on the gaps in the data as a premise of the visualization.

How Third Parties Saw the Work

The reviews right after release came mainly from design media. Here are three with different points.

It’s Nice That (2021-04-22) headlined the piece beautiful yet alarming. In the interview it conveys, in Lupi’s own words, that the research has only just begun and that showing the invisible is an abstract challenge.
Fast Company headlined the causal link by which lattes and takeout connect to the air you breathe. It writes that the aim was a beauty worth lingering in, away from the typical murky depiction of pollution. It also records the division of roles: Cox worked out with researchers “what kind of site raises awareness,” and Cotton took the colors from the look of the microplastics themselves.
PRINT Magazine summarized Data Humanism as “humanizing facts and numbers to frame the problem.” It calls the work deeply captivating and approachable, while mocking the confetti that flies in Deposit as a “shitty pollution party.”

In the author’s reading, none of the three reviews tests accuracy. It’s Nice That looks at the author’s self-awareness, Fast Company at the causal link to daily life, and PRINT at the danger of beauty. PRINT’s sarcasm can be read as pointing at the ambiguity that the beauty reproduces the very allure of plastic.

Takeaways

What Plastic Air offers visualization work is a way of showing things when data is lacking.

The first is to put uncertainty into the language of the screen. In the panel that appears every time you hover over a particle, the field for origin reads possibly from. The estimate is not pushed into a footnote; it is placed at the spot where the reader looks at the details.

The second is, when there is no integrated data, to line up studies with different logics as “conditions.” The rain, city, and remote buttons swap the particle ratios each time you choose. Rather than posing as one correct map, letting readers choose which premise’s sky they are looking at helps them gauge the range of the approximation.

The third is the judgment to set the goal not at “getting the quantities read correctly” but at “making it felt that it is there.” This is a judgment that cannot be used in work where accuracy is required. Even so, for a subject where research is in its infancy and images of harm are scarce, the author thinks that getting people to acknowledge the existence first is the first step.

Lupi made being an approximation the work’s own declaration. The author reads it as a work that, on top of that, went as far as making you feel what is in the sky. The honesty of a visualization is not determined by accuracy alone. It can also be kept by making how much is not known part of how it is shown.

References

Primary sources

Giorgia Lupi, Plastic Air
Plastic Air (the experience itself)
Pentagram, Plastic Air
Experiments with Google, Plastic Air
Alexander Saier, Heartbeat of the Earth: interpreting our planet’s data (UNFCCC / Google, 2021-04-20)
Giorgia Lupi, Data Humanism, The Revolution will be Visualized
Communication Arts WebPicks (includes responses from Cotton, Cox, and Lupi)

Secondary sources

Turning Numbers into Evidence You Can Inhale: Superflux's The Future Energy Lab

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0900

Data is not evidence, writes Anab Jain of Superflux in a Medium essay. The studio’s The Future Energy Lab turned the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) econometric data and future projections into a city model that policymakers could gather around and operate, and into a sample of future air that could be inhaled. It left the numbers off the screen and made them evidence that could be experienced.

The clients were the UAE’s Ministry of Energy and the Prime Minister’s Office, and the presentation took place at a policy lab held around January 2017. What follows draws on Superflux’s official page, Jain’s TED talk (2017), and her Medium essay (2017-06-28). The UAE side’s announcements are checked against government summaries and contemporary press reports.

Policy participants in white thobes and black abayas gather around a glowing city model in a dark room

All photos are from the Superflux official page. They are records of a policy lab held around January 2017, not of a public exhibition.

What did the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Energy ask for?

Superflux’s official page states two challenges. One was to move from safety and certainty toward uncertainty. The other was to turn that uncertainty into a sense of control.

The brief was to build a way of experiencing multiple energy futures. Together with ministers and decision makers, the team would stress-test the opportunities of each future and its consequences for the system as a whole. The goal was to inform national energy policy through 2050.

The venue was called the Future Energy Lab. The official page lists the attendees as the Prime Minister, the cabinet leadership, the Ministry of Energy, policymakers, and heads of utility and energy organizations. In the same setting, the foresight company Rorosoro handled an energy simulator and a role-playing game. Superflux’s part was the Future Energy Zone, which dealt with the future city.

The studio’s annual review lists this project under 2016. The UAE’s Energy Strategy 2050 was announced on January 10, 2017. From the primary sources, the order is that the work was done in 2016 and presented just before the strategy announcement.

The starting material was the Ministry of Energy’s econometric data and projections.

Switching between five futures on a tabletop

The core of the Future Energy Zone is a model of a future metropolis. Superflux writes that it extrapolated the ministry’s data and projections and “played out” in the model what new energy policies imply for the urban landscape. The aim was to surface the link between the macro level of investment and the micro level of social and technological change.

The official photo shows a large table in a dark room. The board is a gridded city, with translucent columns of varying heights standing like buildings. Between the columns, lit from the board, run pink routes and a large yellow-green loop. The differences the official page lists are the adoption of renewable energy, alternative public transport, peer-to-peer energy trading, and social and cultural change.

Close-up of a gridded city model, with pink and yellow-green routes running between translucent columns of varying heights

Photo: from the Superflux official page

A control panel is embedded at the front. The visible labels are RENEWABLE ENERGY, PUBLIC TRANSPORT, and PRIVATE TRANSPORT. Participants are taken through five future worlds.

Numerical screens remain beside the model. According to the official page, a separate screen tracked a future happiness index, energy diversification, the affordability and sustainability of each future, and changes in cost and carbon emissions. A blue screen titled ENERGY SYSTEM shows a quadrant chart, a bar chart, and a donut chart.

The ENERGY SYSTEM screen placed beside the city model, showing a quadrant chart, a bar chart, and a donut chart

Photo: from the Superflux official page

At TED, Jain says that on this city model “we visualized many possible futures.” But this is not a chart on the public web. It is a table that maps policy variables onto the shape, routes, and indicators of a city, and lets them be switched on the spot. The model takes care of space, and the screens take care of indicators.

Even after seeing the model: “I can’t tell my son to give up his car”

At TED, Jain says that a reaction came up: “I can’t tell my son to give up his car.” The backbone of her story is that this failure of understanding created the need for the next piece of evidence, the air.

On an NPR program, Jain uses the term data spectatorship. People look at beautiful visualizations, graphs, and indicators, but they do not understand them as a story directly connected to their own lives, so no action follows. The reaction of the Lab’s participants can be read as one instance of this state.

In her Medium essay, Jain takes the problem a step further. Historical and contemporary data are used as a “power of attorney” for future change. In the age of data capital, she suspects, the belief that data is evidence has hardened. What about what cannot be measured? Why do people not act even when they have information? What about the biases of those who generate the data and those who interpret it?

She then cites Brendan Clarke’s definition: evidence is special data placed in a testing relationship with a hypothesis. On that basis, Superflux writes that it “makes and constructs” the air, products, and services of the future.

Starting from this definition, the author reads the question for visualization as changing. It is not enough to show the right number. The hypothesis that the number tests has to be placed in front of the audience.

Air from 2030, impossible to inhale even in small amounts

Alongside the model, a set of artifacts belonging to each future was made. Superflux calls them “objects of possibility, not prophecy.” White plinths stand in a row, and one of the five objects the official page describes in detail is the air sample.

The air sample shows the consequences of Business As Usual: the air of a city that kept burning fossil fuels. According to the official page, there are three samples, for 2020, 2028, and 2034. Based on projections of climate and fossil-fuel emissions, they contain “the most likely combination” of PM10, PM2.5, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone.

noxious stuff, impossible to inhale even a small amount

These are the official page’s words. They mean something so harmful that even a small amount cannot be breathed in. Superflux positions the sample as delivering experiential evidence to a place that predictions and data cannot reach.

On the left, the label of a 2030 Sharjah air sample; in the center, a flask giving off vapor; on the right, a demonstration

Photo: from the Superflux official page

The label in the photo hides no numbers. It reads AIR POLLUTION SAMPLE 2, location Sharjah, date 4th Nov 2030, with values for PM10, PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide listed. Below is a warning that it may cause stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and more. The year that TED and Medium refer to, 2030, is the year on this label. The official page’s three years (2020 / 2028 / 2034) and the narrated “one breath of 2030” can be read as summaries of the same series.

At TED, Jain says she made an approximate sample with a scientist at a chemistry lab in her home city in India. The apparatus is a white tube set on an Erlenmeyer flask, from which vapor falls. In place of a graph, there is an input to the lungs.

An apparatus for the air sample: a white tube on an Erlenmeyer flask, with vapor falling from it

Photo: from the Superflux official page

The other four objects are a terminal for a fund contributed to children’s futures, a medal awarded to those who contributed to demand reduction, a souvenir from a maglev line linking Abu Dhabi and London, and a screen for Energycoin, a currency for trading surplus electricity. Each can be read as converting a report on 2050 into today’s wallet, honor, and trade.

According to TED, the energy investment announcement came the day after the lab. Jain states a caveat about causation up front: “We don’t know what part our future experiences played in this decision. But we do know that they changed energy policy to mitigate such scenarios.”

The UAE’s own records do not name the studio. On January 10, 2017, the Prime Minister announced the strategy. The 2050 energy mix is 44% renewables, 38% gas, 12% clean fossil, and 6% nuclear. The investment is AED 600 billion (about 163 billion dollars at the time), and that is the total, not renewables alone. Superflux’s official page describes the same amount as going “to renewables.” The figures match, but the two sources describe the breakdown differently.

How did third parties see this work?

There is little design criticism that discusses the piece on its own. Its circulation centers on the episode Jain herself told at TED. Beyond that, here are three venues with different points of focus.

Outlet	Date	Point of focus
NPR TED Radio Hour	2017-09-15	How far a causal link to policy can be claimed
BBC Radio 4 Positive Thinking	2022-08-04	Whether “feeling” the future produces action
designboom	―	The difference between forecasting and speculative design

On NPR, the host Guy Raz presses her. Was the air almost too dangerous? Did a minister say “we don’t want this”? Jain answers, “I think it was one factor. There were many.” This can be read as a record of a third-party interviewer trimming an overestimate of causation on the spot.

BBC Radio 4 took up this work in an episode on the climate crisis. The program’s question was:

Can ‘feeling’ the future create meaningful action to solve the climate crisis?

The question is whether feeling the future can produce meaningful action on the climate crisis. The “air of the future” made for the UAE is lined up as an early example.

designboom’s feature on the studio generalizes a little more. Forecasting extends from data, while speculative design builds from imagination supported by research. Its outputs, it writes, are not reports to be read but rooms to enter, films to watch, and smells that arrive before you understand them. This is not a review specific to the Lab, but it overlaps with the position of the air sample.

Takeaways

There are three things this project offers to visualization.

Decide the hypothesis before you show anything. By Clarke’s definition, data becomes evidence only when tied to a hypothesis. Before drawing a chart, you can write out which question the number tests, such as “what happens to the air under business as usual?”
Divide the work between indicators and experience. The Lab did not abandon screens. The cost and carbon screens stayed beside the model, with the model handling space and the objects handling daily life. The design could be to add, next to a dashboard, one piece translated into the unit of the audience’s own life.
Don’t turn it into a success story. According to TED, the strategy was announced the day after the lab, but the makers themselves say they do not know what share they contributed. In a results report, you can keep official records and self-assessment separate.

In Jain’s telling, the reaction “I can’t tell my son to give up his car” is what created the need for the next piece of evidence, the air. Don’t end by showing numbers; look for a form the audience can receive as their own decision. That is where this work becomes useful.

References

Primary sources

The Future Energy Lab — Superflux (photos are from the same page)
Superflux, Back to the Future: What We Did in 2016 (2017-01-31)
Anab Jain, Can speculative evidence inform decision making? (2017-06-28)
Anab Jain, Why we need to imagine different futures (TED2017) / full transcript on the studio’s site
UAE Ministry of Climate Change and Environment, Strategies (official summary of Energy Strategy 2050)
LeAnne Graves & Thamer Al Subaihi, UAE Energy Plan aims to cut CO2 emissions 70% by 2050 (The National, 2017-01-10)
UAE unveils long-term energy strategy (World Nuclear News)

Secondary sources

NPR / TED Radio Hour, Anab Jain: Can A Glimpse Of Tomorrow, Change Our Decisions Today? (2017-09-15)
BBC Radio 4, Positive Thinking (2022-08-04). Introduced in Superflux Featured on BBC Radio 4
how superflux uses speculative designs to transform our present (designboom)

A Government Agency That Speaks in the River's Poetry: Superflux's The Ecological Intelligence Agency

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0900

“There is plenty of raw data showing how bad pollution is. But it doesn’t lead to change.” So said Jon Ardern, co-founder of Superflux, which made the work, in later reflection. The Ecological Intelligence Agency is a fictional agency that translates data from London’s River Roding into poems spoken by the river and a device that reads jars of water. It can be read as a work that redesigns how the health of a river is received through the senses, rather than adding more numbers.

Superflux made this work in 2023, commissioned by the UK government’s Policy Lab and Defra Futures. Below, I read it in the order a visitor encounters it, following Superflux’s project page, three short films published on Vimeo, and the record Policy Lab published in 2024. The project page ends with a disclaimer that the work does not represent government policy or intent.

June 2023: Gathering at Somerset House

In June 2023, a forum and exhibition called Changing Course was held at Somerset House in London. It was organized by Policy Lab and Defra Futures, with the Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) as co-host. Superflux quotes the following question on its project page.

How can we transform what the freshwater system looks like, 20 years from now and beyond?

The question asks how the freshwater system could be transformed 20 years from now and beyond. Superflux was invited by Neha Sharma of Policy Lab and Phil Tovey of Defra Futures.

According to Policy Lab’s record, the aim was not to predict the future. It was to start conversations and unsettle thinking. Three methods were prepared.

Method	What it involved
Collective intelligence	Gathering opinions using Pol.is
More-than-human moral imagination	The UK government’s first Interspecies Council, by Moral Imaginations
Speculative design	An installation commissioned from Superflux (this work)

About 80 people attended over two days. In other words, the first audience for this work was not general web viewers. It was practitioners involved in freshwater decision-making: policymakers, researchers, NGOs, and regulators.

Ardern’s words quoted at the start, “There is plenty of raw data showing how bad pollution is. But it doesn’t lead to change”, can be read as a reflection on a work aimed at this kind of professional setting.

Placing a jar on the sensor stand

The installation in the official photographs consists of a large wall screen and a white table in front of it. Glass sample jars are lined up on the table, and the jar at the right end sits on a black sensor stand. A cable runs from the stand to the screen, staging the gesture of “reading” a sample.

The whole installation: a white table in front of a wall screen, with sample jars and a sensor stand

Photo: Superflux

The jar labels carry the EIA logo, with the date, location, and collector handwritten on them. The dates are in the mid-2040s. The locations include Hart’s Lane, Wanstead Park, and East Beckton Nature Reserve. The collectors are a Barking resident, a Year 4 primary school survey, and an Ilford resident.

A row of differently colored sample jars with EIA-logo labels on which the date, location, and collector are handwritten

Photo: Superflux

Inside are murky brown water, clear water with duckweed floating on it, and green water choked with algae. Jars of the same standard make the differences in water quality something you can hold in your hand.

The side of the sensor stand has four lamps: POWER, ANALYSING, COMMUNICATING, and READY. The act of placing a jar on the stand is itself the input. The order is handle the water with your hands first, before looking at the screen.

A scene in which a labeled jar collected by a resident in the 2040s is placed by hand on the sensor stand

Photo: Superflux

On screen, official records sit beside children’s observations

The screen’s background is a dark field. Thin green and white lines run across it, and the charts have no axes. Over this, the agency’s windows layer up.

One screen is Referencing community reports. Beside tables of the Environment Agency’s fish counts (1993) and individual lengths (2023) sit a 2043 school survey: a photo of children using nets at the riverside, a close-up of an insect, and the pupils’ written observations. At the lower right, the live reading of a turbidity sensor is shown.

A table of Environment Agency fish data and photos and observation notes from a 2043 school survey on the same screen

Photo: Superflux

The government’s quantitative records and children’s voices appear on the same screen. To me, the two seem to be given equal weight. On another screen, a Barking and Dagenham plan drawing sits next to a photo of a flooded street. Local Facebook and Instagram posts are also treated as a sensor called [SOCIAL MEDIA].

The warning window shows more of what is inside. Under “Analysing water sample…” come OXYGEN LEVELS: LOW, NUTRIENT LEVELS: HIGH, and WATER QUALITY: BAD. Below that is displayed code that writes the thresholds for oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and ammonia as if statements.

A warning that judged water quality BAD, beside the conditional-branch code with the thresholds used for that judgment

Photo: Superflux

A one-word verdict, WATER QUALITY: BAD, does appear. But the verdict is not a black box that outputs only a conclusion. It can be read as a design that shows, as conditional branches, which value exceeded which threshold.

The agency’s setup can also be read as echoing this way of showing. The EIA is premised not as one giant model but as a collection of local AI models. Superflux writes that what it aims for is not a whole picture but a parenthesized (partial) picture, a partial picture of entanglement with the world. When it meets a gap in knowledge, it does not fill it with an answer but points to whom else should be asked.

The river speaks in poetry

In this work, the River Roding itself speaks. A generative model is used to make an LLM speak as the river. The prompts drew on British Romantic ballads, free-verse lyricism, and London spoken word. The input mixes in not only ecological data but also local social media posts. The sound mix was by David Vélez.

Drawing on surveys of the Roding’s environmental and amenity risks, the scenarios split into three. Each is published on Vimeo as a short film.

Short film	Length	Focus as written by Superflux
Pollution	5:34	The effects of forever chemicals on ecosystems, including through the food chain
Sewage	5:40	Large-scale infrastructure and sewage, and the knock-on effects on the river such as algal blooms
Flooding	5:44	Rising flood risk, and imagining living with the natural flow of water

The PFAS warning on screen can be read as corresponding to Pollution, the algae jar and the oxygen-shortage verdict to Sewage, and the flooded-street photo to Flooding. According to Superflux, the range of the prompts runs from a lament for forever chemicals quietly sinking away to imagining a harmonious future.

In this article, I read the poem as something that translates data into a lure for feeling. The clue is the mathematician Whitehead, whom Superflux cites. On this view, a proposition is in itself neither true nor false but a lure for feeling that changes how the world is felt, and its efficacy lies in what it makes possible to feel and think.

In his interview with parCitypatory, Ardern says that much of current law is “damage limitation to keep exploitation going in a controlled form.” In my reading, even if you add more numbers, as long as the frame that sees the river as a service remains, policy only manages the ceiling of harm. The river’s poem can be read as a translation so that people in the policy arena feel the river as a party at the meeting table.

On the other hand, on the project page Tovey writes about a raindrop, borrowing from Tim Morton (and his Kant example). The data of a raindrop, that is, bouncing, wetting, unpleasant, pleasant, this size, this speed, is none of it the raindrop itself. He then asks where the threshold lies for a faithful representation of the nonhuman.

Superflux itself, as we saw above, writes that what it aims for is a (partial) picture. I read the river’s voice as likewise not a faithful copy of the river, and (partial) as a notation that acknowledges that limit.

How third parties saw the work

There were not many specialist reviews right after it opened. Here I set out three views with different points of emphasis.

Policy Lab, the commissioning side, in its February 2024 record, positioned the work as an installation that lets people experience the role of AI in future policymaking. Tovey commented that it made the future a “tangible present,” reaching places analytical foresight alone cannot. To me, this reads as valuing not the accuracy of prediction but that it gave the space of possibilities a form an organization can hold. Superflux, for its part, describes the forum’s discussion as “rich and knotty.”
The trend publication LSN Global (2023-09-29) called it ground-breaking, yet summarized the three short films as stories of “AI solving pollution, sewage, and flooding.” It reads them as a sign of companies finding alternatives to water scarcity and sewage. Superflux’s vocabulary is not “solve” but looking at impacts and imagining ways of living together. The studio’s earlier skepticism toward extractive AI fades in this reading.
Laura Puttkamer of parCitypatory (2025-08-01) interviewed Ardern, starting from the press preview of the More than Human exhibition at the Design Museum in London (2025-07-11 to 10-05). Her focus is whether adding emotion to data can turn residents into guardians of the river. Ardern admits that quantifying the impact is hard. He then points to people who get in touch years later to say “my way of thinking changed,” and to a case where a policymaker used the river’s voice in a workshop, and answers that this is slow work.

The same work was read by the commissioning side as making the future a “tangible present,” and by the trend publication as a sign of AI solutions. The translation into poems and jars changes meaning depending on the recipient’s frame of reference.

Takeaways

What this work shows visualization practice is design for when the data exists but people do not move, not for when data is lacking. I narrow what can be taken away to three points.

First, check who is looking and what they have at hand. The first audience of this work was practitioners involved in freshwater decision-making. I read Superflux as having changed how the data is received instead of increasing the numbers.
Put an entrance you can touch in front of the screen. In this work, placing a jar on the sensor stand was the input. Even for meeting materials, you can start by building from what goes into participants’ hands.
Show the basis for a verdict and the parts that are missing. This work does output a one-word verdict, BAD, but it lays out the threshold if statements, writes (partial), and points to whom to ask for opinions. Before folding things into a single score, you can show what was discarded.

One more thing: Tovey’s caution about the raindrop is, as it stands, a caution for visualization. However carefully you translate, a representation is not the thing itself. Whether it is a poem or a chart, noting that it is a partial picture invites the audience into the discussion.

References

Primary sources

Superflux, The Ecological Intelligence Agency (project page, 2023. Includes comments by Phil Tovey)
Superflux, The Ecological Intelligence Agency — Pollution / Sewage / Flooding (Vimeo)
Policy Lab, Using experimental methods to reimagine decision-making for the freshwater system, post 2043 (2024-02-07)

Secondary sources

LSN Global, Superflux unveils the Ecological Intelligence Agency (2023-09-29)
Laura Puttkamer, If A River Could Speak… (parCitypatory, 2025-08-01)
Design Museum, More than Human (2025-07-11 to 10-05)